This TDS Strategy Memo by Andrew Levison, author of two books and numerous articles about working-class Americans, was written in response to the Demos-TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government.

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In a 2007 article in The American Prospect, pollster Stan Greenberg provided a particularly cogent description of the profound political problem that the decline in trust of government poses for the Democratic coalition:

There is a new reality that Democrats must deal with if they are to be successful going forward. In their breathtaking incompetence and comprehensive failure in government, Republicans have undermined Americans’ confidence in the ability of government to play a role in solving America’s problems. Democrats will not make sustainable gains unless they are able to restore the public’s confidence in its capacity to act through government.
…”the scale of damage done to people’s belief in government is enormous… 62% in a Pew study said they believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. By 57% to 29% Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life rather than helping people. 85% say that if the government had more money it would waste it rather than spend it well.
Although people may favor government action on critical issues like health care, education and energy their lack of trust in governments capacity to spend money properly means that their first priority is to cut wasteful spending and make government more accountable. People are desperate to see accountability from Washington, not just in the spending of tax dollars with no discernible results but also in politicians’ behavior… To have any chance of getting heard on their agenda, Democrats need to stand up and take on the government–not its size or scope, but its failure to be accountable–and deliver the results that people expect for the taxes they pay.

A more recent strategy memo by Greenberg’s Democracy Corps focuses on the overwhelming distrust and contempt with which Congress in particular is viewed:

Voters are disgusted with ‘business as usual’ in Washington. There is a deep and pervasive belief, particularly among independents, that special interests are running things and Members of Congress listen more to those that fund their campaigns than the voters that they are supposed to be representing. Three quarters believe that special interests hold too much influence over Washington today while fewer than a quarter believe that ordinary citizens can still influence what happens in politics. Similarly, nearly 80 percent say that Members of Congress are trolled by the groups that help fund their political campaigns while fewer than a fifth believe that Members listen more to the voters.

For Democrats the fundamental “take-away” from Greenberg’s analysis is simple. Until this profound distrust is overcome Democrats will be unable to pass any major new social legislation or political reform. Democrats have no alternative. They must reduce the enormous cynicism Americans now feel about government.
In political terms the most important demographic group whose opinions of government Democrats must seek to change is the white working class–people who have less than a college degree and are generally employed in “working class” rather than “middle class” jobs. Their support for Democrats plummeted by 12 percent between 2008 and 2010 in large part because of this issue. Without regaining a substantial part of this lost support in 2012, a Democratic victory will be close to impossible.
What Democrats need is a coherent strategy for addressing the complex mixture of attitudes that lies behind hostility and distrust of government–a strategy that not only addresses the problem in a meaningful way but which can also be presented in a consistent and convincing communications campaign.

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In his latest analysis of the 2010 polling Ruy Teixeira points out that the shifts in the numbers of “independents” and “moderates” between 2006 and 2010 is actually an internal process occurring within the Republican coalition. As he says:

“We’re shifting Republicans around between straight identifiers and leaners and both straight Republican identifiers and leaners have become more conservative over time…there is no big ideological shift here viewed across registered voters as a whole. It’s overwhelmingly an intra-Republican story.”

Both of these intra-Republican groups identified in Ruy Teixeira’s latest analysis — the increasing number of conservatives who now call themselves “independents” rather than Republicans and the increasing number of Republicans who now call themselves “conservatives” rather than moderates — are actually familiar to journalists and other social scientists who do ethnographic field research and actively and systematically listen to what people say in everyday conversation. Let’s look at these two groups in turn.
1. A significant group of conservative Republicans has stopped calling themselves Republicans and started calling themselves independents instead
Six or eight years ago avid conservatives to a large degree defined themselves by their avid support and indeed fawning admiration for Bush and Cheney. Asked about their party affiliation six years ago, many conservative Republicans would have indignantly replied: “Of course I’m a Republican. What the hell else would I be – a god-damn Democrat for crying out loud? Jees, don’t be stupid”. As both domestic and foreign disasters accumulated, however, many grass-roots Republicans became alienated from the party. “I’m a conservative” they began saying “and I think that in a lot of ways the Republicans are as bad as the Democrats. I just don’t trust either one of them any more”. As a result, when asked on opinion surveys for their partisan affiliation, increasing numbers began to choose “independent’ rather than “Republican” to reflect their frustration.
2. A significant group of moderate Republicans has begun calling themselves “conservative” rather than “moderate” on surveys
During the early, pre-9/11 era, not all of George W Bush’s supporters considered themselves conservatives. Many considered themselves moderates. They would express this by saying things like “I usually vote Republican but I consider myself a political moderate and not a hard-core conservative. In 1992 I supported Bush senior, in 1996 I supported Bob Dole and In 2000 I supported George W. Bush because he seemed like a moderate too”.
Since Obama’s election, however, as the political debate has become deeply polarized with charges of socialism and fascism leveled against Obama, these same people can no longer accurately express their feelings about politics by calling themselves “moderate Republicans”. They are now more likely to use the word conservative to describe themselves rather than moderate because the latter term does not adequately convey a clear rejection of Obama’s agenda. In actual conversation this “moderate Republican now turned conservative” view is expressed in phrases like “Oh, I’m not a tea party person but I’m really a pretty conservative person in a lot of ways, you know, and I just don’t support a lot of those these things Obama’s doing.”
In fact, their political preference for Bob Dole/George Herbert Walker Bush moderate Republicanism has not significantly changed; they are expressing the same preference in a more polarized political environment.
It is these two internal changes in how both conservative and moderate Republicans define themselves that explains the trends Ruy Teixeira detected and analyzed among “independents” and “moderates”. Not only his analysis but practical ethnographic research as well confirms that the notion of a separate, moderate, independent third force that turned against Obama in 2010 is simply – as James Vega puts it — a mirage.

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In recent days, as increasingly negative projections regarding the November election have appeared, a substantial number of Democrats have been seized with a genuine sense of panic. Many political commentaries have tended to suggest that what is happening may not be just the result of structural factors like the lower participation of pro-Obama groups in off-year elections or the deep recession. Rather, they suggest that a major shift in basic attitudes is occurring – that many Americans are now shifting their allegiance to the Republicans and abandoning Obama and the Democrats. Many Democrats have a sinking fear that support for Obama and the Dems is somehow collapsing.
In order to seriously evaluate this view we have to begin by recognizing that the raw data collected in opinion polls does not come with its own built-in framework for interpretation. Rather, most political opinion poll data is cognitively “shoehorned” into one of two distinct mental models: the “horse race” model or the “sociological” model.
The horse race model is based on the image of two candidates in competition for office and assumes that most voters are continually listening to and evaluating information about the candidates and are therefore very strongly influenced by campaign events like party conventions and televised debates as well as by the daily news headlines. In one formal model in political psychology — called the “online processing” model — voters are visualized as keeping a constantly updated running tally of their impressions of both candidates.
Most national political commentary implicitly accepts the horse race model and generally describes voters as though they were indeed constantly reviewing and revising their impressions and evaluations of candidates and policies. In consequence the ups and downs of candidate approval or voting intentions measured in opinion polls are assumed to be a real-time reflection of this ongoing process.
The sociological model, on the other hand, visualizes a voter’s political attitudes, including decisions about which political party or candidate to vote for, as to a substantial degree determined by an interlocking set of basic value systems that are acquired during childhood socialization and which are then used to determine what the person considers “good” or “bad” and “right” or “wrong.” Once any particular candidate, policy or issue is clearly labeled, categorized and judged within a person’s network of basic value systems, the process of then deciding whether or not to support the candidate or express approval of a particular policy is essentially automatic. Change in these value-based attitudes occurs slowly if at all.
A person’s basic value systems are inherently and inescapably rooted in his or her specific culture and, after the 2000 election, political commentators became very sharply aware of the deep social division of America into the two distinct cultures of “Red vs. Blue” America – the “Red” America that tended to be white, male working class, rural, small town and southern vs. the “Blue” America that tended to be urban, coastal, educated, female and non-white. Numerous commentators noted that these two cultures had very distinct value systems that shaped the evaluation of particular candidates, political parties, polices and issues in dramatically different ways.
In academic political science there is vast literature that studies the demographic and social roots of attitudes like political partisanship, views about issues and candidate choice and few if any political commentators would seriously deny the importance of these underlying social and demographic factors. But, as a practical matter, most daily and weekly political commentary adopts a purely horse race model in which voters are implicitly treated as if they were completely autonomous decision-makers who are reacting entirely to the latest political events.
This approach is understandable since political commentators necessarily try to focus on what is new and novel. The drawback, however is that this perspective can also induce very severe tunnel vision. It needs to be balanced by also looking at current opinion data from a large-scale sociological perspective as well.

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Now that the “spin war” over the size and authenticity of the “tea parties” is over, Democrats should look at the protests more carefully and consider how best to respond.
To begin, the most important fact to note is that there were actually several quite distinct agendas being pursued during the events.
First, the major “non-grass-roots” promoters of the protests – Fox News, Freedomworks, Americans for Progress — ultimately will want to channel the protests back into the “corporate conservatism” of the Republican Party. The essence of this economic approach has been to provide corporate America and the wealthy with their entire short term wish-list without any coherent philosophy or plan guiding decisions. During the Bush years, corporations and industry lobbyists were quite literally allowed to write their own laws and regulations – which were irresponsibly lax as a result – and then to seek and receive bail-outs with public funds when the companies failed. Tax rates on the wealthy were massively lowered without regard to fiscal prudence (on the grounds that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”) and, as a consequence, major increases in the federal budget deficit and public debt were allowed to develop at the “wrong”, expansionary stage of the business cycle.
The Bush administration’s PR machine described this mixture of economic policies as representing a “free market” or “conservative” approach and, at the time, few congressional Republicans made any serious objection to this characterization. But it was, in reality, not grounded in any coherent social philosophy at all. It simply represented the accommodation of whatever short-term corporate demands various industries and lobbyists could successfully push onto the desks of the Bush policymakers.
There was some significant grumbling about this approach among some “grass roots” conservatives during the Bush years, but it was only with the emergence of the crisis last fall that anger exploded across the political spectrum. In the on-site reports from the Tea Parties there are just too many cases of Republicans being booed, heckled and even discouraged from attending the protests to ignore.
But what were the alternative views? Some protestors were focused on a wide variety of perennial “grass-roots” conservative social issues – evolution, gun control and abortion. Other, more conspiratorially minded protestors focused on Obama’s supposed “non-citizenship”, “hidden” Moslem beliefs or “secret plans” for police round-up’s of true patriots and concentration camps. These participants drew disproportionate attention because their signs, costumes and slogans were particularly flamboyant, but most reports suggested that they were not expressing the typical view of the attendees.
On the contrary, the on-the-scene reports by citizen journalists from Huffington Post and other web publications suggest that probably the largest single group within the tea parties were neither corporate Republicans, single-issue protestors nor conspiracy theorists. Writing in the Washington Examiner, Byron York offered a particularly empathetic view of their attitudes which he portrayed as a mixture of bewildered patriotism, fear of the unknown and nostalgia for traditional, “old-fashioned” economic values and attitudes.
For Democrats, the key to understanding the outlook of this “small-town traditional” group is to recognize that it is not the expression of the standard, “institutional” conservative ideology of the Heritage Foundation and University of Chicago. On the contrary, it is an authentically “grass roots” perspective rooted in a “common sense” understanding of economic affairs that arises from practical experience in the world of small business. The Americans who embrace this view have never read Milton Friedman or attended any formal lectures in their lives. Their philosophy is sustained by the informal exchange of ideas with friends, neighbors and co-workers and is derived from daily life in “the real world” as it appears to many average Americans.
At the core of this view are a cluster of ideas that can best be summed up as “pre-Keynesian.” It is an approach that is unified by the idea that that government should be run according to the same principles that apply to running a small business.

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(Andrew Levison is the author of two books and numerous articles on the social and political attitudes of blue collar workers and other ordinary Americans)
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It is an unfortunate fact that during election years important discussions of long-term political strategy often get oversimplified and distorted in order to squeeze them into conventional campaign narratives.
This is what happened to an important Democracy Corps memo issued several weeks ago. The memo — which offered an analysis of polls and focus group data on a range of domestic economic issues including immigration and open borders — got grabbed and sucked up into the mainstream media debate about the electoral wisdom of the Republican’s “get tough”, anti-illegal immigrant posturing and whether the Democrats should follow their lead or stick to traditional progressive principles.
But this was not the specific issue the D-Corps memo was actually evaluating and its more subtle strategic analysis and conclusions should not be allowed to get lost in the shuffle. The central finding of D-Corps’ polls and focus groups was that a profound and unrecognized degree of frustration exists among average middle-class Americans regarding a wide range of economic issues, feeding an extraordinarily deep contempt and anger at the political establishment, Democratic as well as Republican. The Memo’s key thesis was that, without a proper political strategy, this deep discontent will not necessarily benefit the Democrats next year.
In regard to immigration, the memo noted three critical facts:
1. While Democrats in the survey identified Iraq and health care as the major areas where the country was going in the wrong direction, the top issue identified by independents was immigration and “unprotected borders.” 40% of independents chose this option – no other issue even came close.
2. Immigration and open borders were the top concern for those voters who want to vote Democratic but are holding back – the most attainable swing voters of all.
3. The voters who were most angry about the issue were those with a high school education and rural voters – groups where recent surveys have suggested Democrats might otherwise be able to regain some lost ground.
The first point that should be noted is that these conclusions are focused on how immigration is perceived by a specific group of voters – “ordinary middle-class” swing voters – and not how the issue will play with the electorate as a whole (In fact, when D-Corps studied national opinion as a whole, they found slightly less support for the one- sided “get tough” measures then for alternatives that included some path to citizenship).
More important, the basic problem the D-Corps memo identified is not simply that there is substantial middle-American antagonism to illegal immigration. It is that this sentiment threatens to fuse with three other attitudes among many potential democratic voters: a sense of severe economic distress; a feeling of powerlessness and of being ignored by political leaders; and a simmering sense of class resentment toward the “liberal” educated elite. This was the potent ideological package that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes used to ride to the presidency and which Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ross Perot and scores of their lesser imitators have ridden to national celebrity.
It is not surprising that Democracy Corps detected this emerging danger. Back in the 1980s Stan Greenberg, the lead author of the memo, was the first political analyst to clearly understand and map the distinct political attitudes of the “Reagan Democrats” – the traditionally Democratic blue-collar and grey-collar workers whose defection to the Republicans has arguably been the most fundamental (and intractable) demographic problem for the Democrats during the past 25 years. The clear implicit warning the recent D-Corps memo contains is that if Democrats fail to successfully confront the current challenge, these voters could be lost for another quarter-century.

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